Brewing Features

Those who today enjoy drinking the beers produced by New York’s F.X. Matt Brewing Co. have soft drinks to thank. It was soda production that helped the Matt family business stay afloat through the 1920s and early ’30s, when producing and selling alcohol became the business of bootleggers. Once Prohibition ended, beer production resumed and... View Article

Is there an official beer of summer? Starting well before Memorial Day each year, ales and lagers with summer in their names, picturing all manner of warm-weather activities or leisure, begin arriving on shelves and on tap. It’s a can-popular season, and from lightly spiced ales to citrus-heavy wheats, or even specialty-branded American lagers, there’s a... View Article

Like so many breweries around the country, New Holland Brewing Co. gives visitors a selection of special offerings when they grab a seat in the brewpub. Recent options have included a maibock, Czech pilsner and even a fermented tea known as kombucha, dubbed “Pina Colada” by the brewers. But sometime around mid-2014, unsuspecting patrons were... View Article

For a brief but unfortunate time in the history of beer, “fruit beer” was synonymous with “bad beer.” This was the time when brewers were adding fruit to beers to make them sweet and syrupy and marketed them to people who didn’t much like beer. In truth, fruit has been used in beer for a... View Article

This sidebar on award-winning fruit beers accompanied an article entitled “A Cornucopia of Beer” in our May 2015 issue. There are a lot of fruit beers on the market today, using all manner of fruits. Look for these which have been judged as some of the best: 2014 Great American Beer Festival American-Style Fruit Beer Gold:... View Article

One afternoon several years ago, Jace Marti was wandering the warehouse of his family’s 150-year-old brewery in New Ulm, Minnesota, when he discovered a set of hulking cypress lagering tanks. The tanks, which dated to the 1930s and hadn’t been in use by August Schell Brewing Co. for nearly 20 years were in terrible, dilapidated... View Article

When Scott Smith, founder and owner of East End Brewing in Pittsburgh, started selling his beer more than a decade ago, rating websites like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer were valuable resources for his young brewery. In the pre-social-media era, the forums on the sites provided insightful access to consumers, and reviews provided a “first line” for... View Article

The following three beers accompanied “The Agony and Ecstasy of Beer Reviews,” which appeared in our July 2015 issue. Consumer review systems often find their value depending upon how effectively the information is presented and, in turn, used. Individual beer pages on RateBeer include, in addition to each beer’s overall score, its score relative to just those... View Article

A few months after the BP oil spill ravaged the Gulf Coast in the spring of 2010, Louisiana’s Abita Brewing Co. announced a homebrew contest. Hundreds of recipes came in from around the country. Baton Rouge native Kerry Dale Yoes, who had been homebrewing for eight years, looked to his beloved-now-ravaged home for inspiration. “After... View Article